[Swift-devel] Swift-issues (PBS+NFS Cluster)

[Tim Freeman]

On Tue, 12 May 2009 12:04:23 -0500
Michael Wilde <wilde at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Indeed.
> 
> I should note that the intent in Swift is to reduce or eliminate 
> accesses to shared filesystems, so EBS and S3 would become similar.

Is that for speed or less moving parts?  I think EBS is the fastest option they
have for disk space (faster than local disk), fyi.

And just to make sure everyone is on same page they are not shared in and of
themselves.  They are much like any block device that you mount to an OS.
Multiple EC2 instances can not mount them simultaneously.

They are durable (exist without ec2 instances attached to them), portable (can
be mounted by other instances if the current instance dies etc), snapshottable
(with explicit save to S3, it is not the same thing as S3), RAID-able (one
instance can mount multiple EBS volumes and get even more performance), but not
shared in the traditional sense of the word.

Tim